Istanbul’s Troubled Gardens: Yedikule’s Lettuce

The bostans (market gardens) of Yedikule line the southern edge of the fifth-century walls that enclosed Byzantine Constantinople. The gardens may be as old as the walls. An edict in the Theodosian Code (422 A.D.) designates space in the walls’ towers for storing produce and farming implements; a sixth-century Byzantine text mentions the cultivation there of “a large variety of green salads, endive, carrots, onions, and cabbage.” To this day, the Yedikule bostans are known for their salad greens, particularly a special lettuce.

Just over a week ago, bulldozers started burying the bostans—located in the rich, fertile soil of a former moat—under several feet of rubble. The rubble will then be covered by a layer of “low-quality soil” and turned into a ninety-thousand-square-metre park with cafés and an artificial river. (The style seems consistent with a nearby luxury housing development of recent construction.) Last Friday, I visited the bostans with the artist Sibel Horada.

Yedikule is located in the conservative, pro-government Fatih municipality, on the other side of the Golden Horn from Istanbul’s Taksim Square and Gezi Park. It’s one train stop from Kazlicesme, where Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan recently held a massive rally for his supporters. Yedikule means “seven towers,” and refers to the four Byzantine and three Ottoman towers in the city walls; the train lets you off near the dungeons where Sultan Osman II met a terrible death.

Passing the fortress, we walked along the walls and came upon a wide swath of land covered with dirt, rocks, and debris. Under the blazing sun, a handful of workers were laying electrical wire. It’s Ramadan now, so they weren’t drinking water. Making our way over the irregular, dusty terrain, past construction vehicles and corrugated-metal fences, we struck up a conversation with two older women in headscarves who told us that this part of the bostan had been filled in years ago, and nothing was planted. It’s effectively becoming a dumping ground. The women said they couldn’t open their windows all summer—by day, because of the smell, and by night, because of the dreadful crimes. Once, a girl had gone missing, and then had been found—hanging from a tree. Little children had been found with their clothes disarrayed. A man operating a mobile dialysis unit had raped someone in the dialysis unit. “Even in this heat we close the curtains,” one of the women concluded. “We don’t want to see anything. Sometimes we hear screams. Then we suffer from our consciences.”

The women still remembered the bostan, which had been cool, lovely, and fragrant. But they also seemed excited about the park. Pretty much anything would be preferable to a wasteland full of garbage and rapists.

Turning a corner, we came upon an intact stretch of bostans—lush, green rectangles spreading out to the horizon. Green stalks shot out of the ground as if in praise. Pausing to admire purslane, mint, chard, black cabbage, and a single flowering artichoke, we came to a makeshift shed where two women and a young girl were sorting grape leaves in the shade of a plastic tarp. “Just call us ‘the wronged women who work in the bostan,’ ” said the first woman, who was wearing a sparkly purple blouse. “Or no—just ‘the wronged women.’ ” The second woman, whose blouse was sparkly and pink, remained silent, sternly pulling the stems off a handful of grape leaves.

In Ottoman times, the Yedikule bostans belonged to the Armenians. Over the centuries, they were farmed by Greeks, then by Bulgarians and Albanians, and, since the nineteen-fifties, by migrants from the Black Sea region of Kastamonu. The two women and their families had arrived in Istanbul from Kastamonu only a few years earlier. They had worked at another bostan near the airport, but it had been paved over. Now they had to move again. The first woman said they had been given seven days’ notice to vacate; her friend had heard rumors earlier—a month and a half ago. Both agreed that the bulldozers could come any day now, that they often turned up without warning, and that all they wanted was to be allowed to stay until November, so they could finish the harvest and settle all their debts.

“You see how we live,” the first woman said. “You see what poverty. Look at what’s over our heads—our only shade in this heat.”

I realized with astonishment that what I had taken to be a tarp overhead was actually a segment of a vinyl banner with Erdoğan’s head on it. His face was the size of the table. “We put the Prime Minister above us, and he puts us below him,” she said.

Before the previous week, the woman in the purple shirt had been a staunch Erdoğan supporter. At nine o’clock at night, when people banged pots and pans to signify solidarity with the Gezi protests, she had reproached them. “I said, ‘What’s wrong with this Prime Minister? How are we ever going to get a minister better than this one? The working people have bread! This minister is the best minister!’ We loved our minister,” she said. “But that love is over.”

“Keeping people from their bread—that’s a bad thing,” her friend agreed.

“If we weren’t hungry, we’d go sit in Gezi Park, too! Why not? But what are we going to eat there? What is there for us? What is that park going to give us to eat? It’s not like a bostan that gives fruits and vegetables.”

Leaving the bostan, Sibel and I walked through Yedikule’s residential neighborhood. In the space of a few blocks, we saw three or four heavily perspiring young women in headscarves and trench coats, each with two or more small children. It’s hard to argue that the neighborhood doesn’t need a park. On the other hand, it’s also hard to argue that there can be no park without the complete destruction of the Yedikule bostans—the position held by the mayor of the Fatih municipality. When activists held a press conference in Yedikule last week, the mayor met them with hostility. Soon a polarizing debate had erupted, with the mayor’s supporters wanting to know who the activists thought they were. How dare they show up at the last minute—years after the first bulldozers came—and stand in the way of a children’s park?

The activists, whose numbers include architects and city planners, replied that they only wanted to open a conversation about the design of the park. They wanted to see the plans and understand them. They wanted to know whether the ground level really had to be raised by several metres of rubble, and whether the park could be redesigned to incorporate some part of the gardens. What if part of the land was reserved for a playground, while another part integrated the bostan, perhaps using elevated walkways or transparent partitions? Couldn’t the bostans be used not to obstruct the park but to enhance it—to make it a thing of beauty and meaning? Didn’t they belong not to the Fatih municipality but to the whole city, and even the world?

Alessandra Ricci, an archaeologist at Koç University, has argued that the bostans should be protected under the UNESCO provisions for Intangible Cultural Heritage. “Intangible heritage” is a relatively recent category, and poses a tantalizing paradox: What if it’s possible, by relinquishing our grip on physical objects, to arrive at a truer sense of historical place? A head of lettuce in Yedikule in 2013 isn’t physically the same head of lettuce that grew there in 1013, but it’s still a functional lettuce. In a way, the Yedikule bostans give us a sense of history that we can’t get from, say, the Yedikule dungeons, which are physically the same dungeons that stood there in the fifteenth century but which no longer function the same way. UNESCO does currently recognize the Istanbul land walls as a historical site; yet it’s a marvellous and still underacknowledged gift to be able to look at those walls and also see, smell, and taste the actual living descendants of Byzantine lettuce.

After all, when we only visit fortresses, palaces, dungeons, and temples, we miss a big part of the story. As Ricci put it in an e-mail, “We are now being ‘forced’ to associate the land walls of Istanbul with conquests, wars, assaults, triumphs—e.g., the 1453 Panorama Museum—but in reality most of the life of the walls was about something else, and the bostan is a testimony of this.” Erdoğan, who frequently invokes Turkey’s Ottoman past, opened the 1453 Panorama Museum, which is devoted to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. He has successfully fashioned himself as an Ottoman-style ruler: tough, ambitious, grandiose, the kind of guy who plants a hundred and fifty-two thousand flowers overnight just to make a point.

And yet, history is a multifaceted thing. It’s possible to envision an altogether different Ottoman politics: one valuing adaptability, compromise, and a highly developed aesthetic sense. It’s worth noting in this context that when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, they didn’t destroy the Hagia Sofia but converted it into a mosque. Mimar Sinan, the greatest Ottoman architect, designed the minarets and added pillars to reinforce the dome against earthquakes. Then, drawing both on the knowledge he had gained from the Hagia Sofia and on his own particular talent, Mimar Sinan went on to build some of the most beautiful mosques the world had ever seen.